


we are young supernovas (and the heat's about to break)

by awkwardspiritanimals



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Academy!fic, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-16 08:45:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2263284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awkwardspiritanimals/pseuds/awkwardspiritanimals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“How come you’ve never tried to kiss me?” Jemma asks, quite suddenly in his opinion, and he chokes on his drink. Fitz doesn’t even have time to catch his breath, much less sputter out a response, before she’s tugging him forward and pressing her mouth against his insistently.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we are young supernovas (and the heat's about to break)

Fitz isn’t sure he really likes wine. Simmons’ cousin had sent her a rather nice bottle as a Christmas gift, and now they’re drinking it in her room out of paper cups. He would have liked to stay in his dorm, since he’s not looking forward to the long walk across the empty campus back to his building, but she had claimed that her room had the appropriate mood lighting and had made him come over, grumbling into his scarf while she laughed at him. Before meeting Jemma Simmons, he never would have thought that there was an appropriate mood lighting for drinking wine out of paper cups, and he certainly wouldn’t have guessed ‘Christmas lights’ if asked about it.

He’s had most of one glass, trying to get used to the taste, while Simmons has had at least four. She’s got her legs across his lap, lying spread out along the couch, and she’s talking about Drew Holden, a boy in their chemistry class she’d gone out with the week before.

“Are you going to see him again?” he asks, mostly because it feels like the next thing you’re supposed to say when you are someone’s best friend and they’re telling you about a date. He doesn’t mind playing the role; what Simmons does in the free time she doesn’t spend with him is her business, because it’s her life and her body and he figures that the only time he would ever need to get involved is if one of them broke her heart or something and he needed to beat the snot out of him. Not that he’d really be able to do that, since most of the guys Simmons is interested in look like they would fit in just fine over at Operations, and also she can take care of herself. But it feels like the role he’s supposed to fill as her best friend, if it comes to that.

She shrugs, “I don’t think so. He’s nice enough, and his face is very nice, but he’s sort of boring.”

Fitz laughs, “That’s what you say about all of them.”

Another shrug, “It’s true of all of them,” she sips at her drink, “You’re pretty much the only really interesting person here.”

He blushes, ducking his face towards his nearly empty glass in an attempt to hide it, “Really?”

“Yes. Why do you think I spend so much time with you?” she asks, struggling to sit up for a moment, reaching out to use his shoulder to pull herself up. Even without removing her hand from him, she still sways slightly for a few seconds, attempting to get her balance, and Fitz bites his lip to try and hold in a laugh. He fails.

“You’re drunk, Simmons.”

“Little bit,” this doesn’t seem to bother her in the slightest, “What were we talking about? Oh, yes, you being interesting and me hanging out with you because of it.”

“Gee, glad to know that’s the reason. Here I was thinking it was because you liked me,” he says, rolling his eyes, even though it stings a little bit; they’ve never really talked about their being friends, and maybe she’s just spent the whole time trying to figure him out or waiting for someone else interesting to come along. But he knows she’s drunk and tired, so he let’s it go without any further comment.

“I do like you. A lot. The thing of it is that I like many people, but I do not find many people interesting. I find you interesting,” she repeats, and the hand that had previously been on his shoulder has moved up so that her fingers grip at his collar, the backs brushing against the skin of his neck. Fitz holds himself carefully still to avoid shivering at the contact.

“I like you, too. And I find you interesting,” he rushes to add, worried she might misunderstand his comment in her drunken state.

“Good,” Simmons says, and she’s not meeting his eyes anymore exactly, just staring at him intensely, like she’s puzzled by something about his face. Her grip on his collar tightens slightly, and Fitz swallows hard, bringing his glass up to finish off his wine. He generally tries not to think about Simmons as a girl, because she’s gorgeous and it would be distracting because she spends quite a bit of time in his personal space, but thoughts of a certain nature slip through from time to time. And now she’s practically in his lap, fingers tangling in his shirt and brushing the sensitive skin of his neck, glowing slightly in the dim light of her room, saying nice things about him, and he’s trying to use the terrible taste of the wine to distract himself.

“How come you’ve never tried to kiss me?” she asks, quite suddenly in his opinion, and he chokes on his drink. Fitz doesn’t even have time to catch his breath, much less sputter out a response, before she’s tugging him forward and pressing her mouth against his insistently.

His first thought is that he doesn’t mind the taste of wine so much when it’s mixed with the taste of her. His second is that she is impossibly graceful, especially given the fact that she couldn’t even sit up without swaying a minute ago, as she turns herself, pulling her legs back and then straddling his lap, and it doesn’t seem like it should actually be physically possible for her to move like that and still keep kissing him and maybe Jemma Simmons is actually magic.The third thought is that he doesn’t know where to put his hands, and then she rolls her hips firmly against his and his thoughts lose all coherence and order.

Her hands are on his chest, fumbling open two buttons of his shirt as she transfers her lips to his neck, and Fitz is pretty sure he might actually pass out right this moment. One of his arms has wrapped low around her waist, and he can feel just the slightest start of a distinctive curve under his last two fingers and she is absolutely going to slap him when she comes back to herself and he is absolutely not going to blame her because he is actually incapable of moving his hand right now even though he knows he should. Her hips roll again, and he can’t hold back the moan the friction pulls from his chest.

Simmons leans away from him just slightly, reaching back for her glass of wine and taking a sip, looking down at him, and Fitz waits for her to slap him because his right hand has slipped even lower and his left has somehow managed to find its way underneath her shirt and the skin at her waist is impossibly soft.

“I mean, really,” she says, out of breath, “I’m gorgeous, and smart, and I dress better than pretty much everyone on this campus. And I don’t think you’re gay, because I’m very observant and I spend almost all my time around you, and honestly, I know you hated me for the first couple of months we knew each other, but-”

“What?” he asks, her last statement finally pulling him out of his daze, and she’s stopped actively moving, except for where she has one hand tracing patterns where his neck meets his shoulder, so he’s got most of his mental capacity back. About half, probably, because she is still in his lap and her face is close enough to his that he can feel her breath against his lips and see every single color in her eyes even in the dim lighting and she smells really nice and, “You thought I hated you?”

She scoffs, like it’s obvious, “Of course you did. You would barely speak to me, and you were always trying to one up me in classes, and sometimes you just completely avoided me altogether.”

“I wasn’t trying to one up you. Well, ok, sometimes I was, but I’m choosing to blame that on you, because _you_ were always trying to one up _me_ ,” he swallows, “I was trying to impress you.”

“Impress me?”

“Yeah. I mean, you were obviously the smartest person here, and ridiculously pretty, and I don’t know, I just thought we would get on. But I didn’t really know how to talk to you, and I thought if I could sufficiently impress you, you’d talk to me and things would just sort of, you know, happen.”

“Things?” Simmons asks, eyebrows raised, and Fitz scrambles.

“Friendship things. Platonic things,” he smiles, just slightly, and he wishes he had a hand free to rub at the back of his neck, but he still can’t move them from their positions on her body. Her hand has moved across his shoulder underneath his shirt as he spoke, still tracing designs, chemical formulas and molecular models, he recognizes hazily.

“Oh,” she says, and he can’t read the expression on her face, and then she leans down and kisses him again, her hands slipping down from his shoulders to undo more buttons, and Fitz can’t help but kiss her back, because she’s gorgeous and warm and he’s thought about this more times than he’s willing to admit even to himself. Simmons traces his ribs with her fingers once she has his shirt all the way open, and sets her teeth into his bottom lip for a few seconds before sweeping her tongue across the area and it’s all he can do to try and keep up.

Her fingers flick open his belt with truly surprising ease and she’s moved back down to his neck and he finally manages to get his brain to remember human words and communicate them to his mouth.

“Simmons. Simmons. Jemma,” he says, feeling enormously privileged to call her that, even if it is just to get her attention. She pulls away to look at him, brown eyes dark and fiery, and it takes considerable effort on his part to keep speaking instead of just kissing her again. If this wasn’t so important to him, he probably couldn’t have managed it.

“I’m not like you. I can’t,” and he pauses, trying to figure out exactly how to phrase what he needs to say, “I can’t just do this,” he gestures vaguely between them with a nod, because he still can’t take his hands off of her, “and then go back to being friends. Or not being friends. I’m not judging you,” and he’s scrambling now, but he has to make her understand and he’s so awful at words but the most important thing in the world to him at that moment is that Jemma Simmons understands what he’s trying to say, “I’m just not like you. I can’t just do this and go back to normal. I couldn’t just go back to being your best friend and then it would be my fault that our friendship was ruined,” he swallows hard and only by some incredible miracle does he manage to look her in the eye as he says the next part, because it scares the shit out of him to say this to her, because she is brilliant and gorgeous and he had spent months trying to impress her and he still is really and she is the only friend he’s ever had and if you’re only going to have one friend your whole life it should be Jemma Simmons.

“I don’t know how to not be your best friend anymore.” He finally breaks his gaze from hers, swallowing hard. It’s silent for a long time, and Fitz wishes he could run, but she’s still perched on his lap. Finally, gentle fingers catch under his chin and lift his face to hers.

“And if I don’t just want this to be a one time thing?”

“You’re drunk, Jem- Simmons,” he says, because he doesn’t want to go back to calling her by her last name, not now that he knows the shape of _Jemma_ in his mouth, but he will. His heart thumps hard at the implication of her words despite his response.

“Not that drunk.”

He sighs, “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll go back to my dorm right now, and give you time to sober up and think. And after you’ve done that, if you still want this, well,” he says, trying to smile and joke to help him ignore the knot of _something_ forming in his chest, “I think you can tell that I’d be interested.”

“And if I don’t want to do this, after that? If I say tonight was a drunken mistake and we should just stay friends?”

“Then by day, I’ll be your best friend and nothing has to change, and by night I’ll probably have a series of very, very inappropriate dreams about my best friend. Sound like a plan?”

Simmons laughs, softly, and leans in to press one last gentle kiss against his mouth before nodding, and sliding off his lap. She offers him another glass of wine as he buttons his shirt, and he declines, because he really can’t imagine ever liking the taste of it, not unless it's mixed with the feel of her sighing against his mouth. He pulls on his jacket and wraps his scarf around his neck, and they awkwardly wave goodbye to each other before he sets off across the deserted campus back towards his dorm.

He barely notices the cold.

\---------------

The next morning, Leopold Fitz wakes up to a pajama-clad Jemma Simmons straddling him. The warm weight of her settling over his hips pulls him out of sleep, and he opens bleary eyes to see her smirking down at him. Biting down on his lower lip is the only way to keep the sound he wants to make from escaping him, because his comforter and pajama bottoms are not necessarily that thick and she is _right there_.

“Morning,” she says brightly, like this situation is completely normal, and the sunlight coming through his window is catching in her hair, and how is it in anyway fair that she looks that gorgeous this early in the morning.

“Morning,” he replies, trying to keep his voice as normal as possible even as she slips her fingers under the edge of his t-shirt. Jemma, and he can’t help thinking that now, tilts her head, like she’s considering him.

“You look adorable right when you wake up,” she says, sounding pleased with this particular discovery, and Fitz blushes at her comment and about the realization that she had walked across the empty campus in her pajamas, quite possibly because she didn’t want to waste anymore time than necessary before seeing him.

“So I’m completely sober now.”

“Good to know.”

“And I thought about everything you said, both last night and this morning when I woke up, and I have decided that last night was not a drunken mistake and I definitely want to do this. And not just this. Other things too.”

“Okay,” he says, and he is still struggling to keep his voice even because she has begun to sort of swivel her hips above him and he’s straining to keep his own hips pressed into the mattress, “What now?”

“Now you come up here so I can take off your shirt and kiss you.” Her hands move further up his chest underneath his t-shirt, leaving trails of heat across his skin.

“At the same time?” he asks with a smile, raising his eyebrows at her.

“We’ll see,” she replies, and the tone of voice she uses is one he’s never heard before and which does funny things to his brain and his heart and other parts of his anatomy, and he’s scrambling up, tugging on his shirt to help her pull it over his head before Jemma threads her hands through his curls and brings his mouth to hers.

They stay like that for a while, Fitz using one hand to prop himself up and letting the other wrap around her waist to hold her close to him, while Jemma seems intent on trailing her fingers over every inch of his back and chest. At some point, she rolls her hips and he can’t stop himself from bucking up to meet her, feeling her smirk as he groans against her lips. Her expression softens as she pulls away.

“I’m not,” she starts, and it’s the first time since she kissed him last night that she’s really looked unsure, “I’m not very good at the other parts of dating.”

“Me neither,” Fitz says with a smile, “But maybe we just haven’t been dating the right people?”

“Yeah?” she asks, grinning brightly at him, and he flops back onto his bed, using his grip on her to bring her down over him.

“Yeah. There’s nothing we can’t figure out together, right?”

“Right,” Jemma answers, and she sits up to begin working free the buttons on her pajama top, because of course Jemma Simmons wears matching pajama sets, and Fitz is torn between lying back to enjoy the view and helping her. After a few moments, he decides that this particular problem is one they should solve together, and he follows her up.

His fingers find the buttons and his mouth finds her newly exposed collarbone, and he whispers _Jemma_ against her skin, still feeling the weight of that particular privilege. She’s smiling when she tugs his face up to hers so she can kiss him again.

**Author's Note:**

> Many people have written academy!fic, and a great deal of it is better than this, but this is actually so far out of my normal comfort zone that I really can't tell whether it's awful or not and I kind of like it.
> 
> The title (like many of my titles) is from a Mountain Goats song, High Hawk Season. The song doesn't really match the fic very well, but I really love that phrase, and I thought it went well with Fitzsimmons for a variety of reasons.


End file.
